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Andree Guelen Herscovici, Belgium

Andrée Guelen Herscovici was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1921. At the age of 18, she began teaching at a local school. This was the year during which the Nazis occupied Brussels. At school, Andrée noticed that children were disappearing from her class. She investigated and learned that the children had been taken to concentration camps because they were Jewish. This angered her and she undertook rescue work. Together with another women, Andrée took young children and made dangerous journeys with them to other parts of the country, where the kids were placed safely with a non-Jewish families. Almost 1,000 children were rescued.

”I think when you feel you’re doing something absolutely necessary, fear is in the background. You don’t really think about it,” said Andrée Geulen Herscovici about her experiences during the war, ”Everything I am today I owe to that period of my life, those three years.”